


Kingdom of Sand

by Quettaser



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Egypt, M/M, Spies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:32:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quettaser/pseuds/Quettaser
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Control had not specified why exactly they were sending Bill into the depths of Egypt, but it had been made clear that Jim was to guard Circus’s most valued employ. Not that Jim needed much in the way of prompting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kingdom of Sand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GloriaMundi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/gifts).



Jim weaved his way through the stalls for the second time in the last fifteen minutes. Their driver was late. Jim took a different path this time, left at the pottery rather than right. He remained unhurried as he scanned the busy Cairo streets. The bazaar hadn’t yet truly opened, wary-eyed vendors were still hauling out their goods for the day, but the streets in this city never had a quiet hour.

Bill was some hundred metres away, just within Jim’s field of sight, waiting for their driver. There was no sign that he was being watched. A battered and dirty Jeep drove around the corner. Even without the layers of dust, it would have been old. It looked pre-war, sounded pre-war as well. It honked its horn, scattering the stray dogs that had been meandering in the road.

When Jim got near, he could hear snippets of their conversation, a price negotiation, mostly in broken English and the occasional mispronounced Arabic. Each time Bill would attempt a word he would smile sheepishly and shrug. The driver seemed willing to work with him. “I look at map, tell you how long.”

Bill nodded enthusiastically. Jim checked the expanse of the bazaar one more time as he neared the jeep. “Ahh, there’s my research assistant now. Get the bags, won’t you, Jeremy?” Bill asked, gesturing at their luggage piled next to him. He looked pleased with himself.

“Sure, Dr. Gladstone,” said Jim. Bill was enjoying being out in the field again far too much. There was more than a good chance he was going to lecture about hieroglyphs for the entire drive. Control had not specified why exactly they were sending Bill into the depths of Egypt, but it had been made clear that Jim was to guard Circus’s most valued employ. Not that Jim needed much in the way of prompting.

“Two days,” said the driver, laying the map on the hood of the car for Bill to see. He ran his finger along the west bank of the Nile. “Drive here, sleep in Al Minya. Then, Asyut to buy _supplies_ ,” the driver pronounced the world carefully, approximating Bill’s accent. “Make Al Uqsur before dark.”

“Very good,” said Bill, who began pulling pound notes from his pocket and counting. “Half now, you get the rest in Luxor.

The driver counted the money three times before sliding it into his money clip, putting it away and climbing into the jeep. Bill took the passenger side and Jim sat in the back. He could wait until they were past the edge of the city and then lay out with his hat over his face and hopefully catch some sleep. He had spent most of the night making sure that Bill hadn’t picked up any followers after his trip to the embassy. They had needed Bill’s connections to get the driver in the first place, but government buildings were bad places for British men in Egypt these days.

As the jeep rumbled its way out of Cairo, Bill kept up conversation with the driver - Hasani, Bill had learned - asking him about his family, his job and the best places to eat in the city. Later, when Jim was drifting off to sleep, Bill had already begun tutoring Hasani’s English.

Minya was a fairly large city on the banks of the Nile. Bill had extolled the virtues of its university to Hasani. Their hotel was near the city centre but not on the river itself. Bill had paid for Hasani’s room as well as their own and had told Jim, ‘Do what you must; I will be searching out the finest local spirits.’ This, for Jim, meant taking a long walk through the entire hotel - fifteen small rooms - and the surrounding block.

Later, he found Bill in the back of the dingy bar next to the hotel. There were a few men, older, with rough hands, lined up in seats at the bar and a few tables near the front of younger groups, possibly students. The bartender fidgeted with the knobs of the radio until some station came in clear. Jim couldn't identify the music; Arabic of some kind at least. Bill sat in the far corner with his back to Jim with a bottle of something hideous and two glasses on the table. One of them was empty.

“I guessed that you might want the seat facing the door,” said Bill, filling the second glass without looking up at Jim’s approach.

“You guess well,” Jim replied, sliding into the seat across from Bill. He knocked some of the dust off of his hat and placed it on the table next to their glasses. “I feel as though my lungs will never rid themselves of this grit.”

“Marvellous feeling, isn’t it? And we haven’t even left the floodplain. Imagine what the desert is truly like,” Bill said with a smile. He held up his glass towards Jim, as if for a toast. He really did seem reinvigorated by being out in the world again. “To Egypt, and her fine local whiskies.”

Jim dutifully picked up his drink and downed it. The whisky soothed the pain in his mouth from the sand; or dulled it in any case. It wasn’t half bad, for whisky.

Bill poured Jim another. “This place is owned by the same man who owns the hotel. He recommended this fine establishment, if you can believe it. He also bought me this bottle,” Bill said, putting it down on the table. “He said he wished things had gone another way with the Suez. Englishmen were quite a lot of his business.”

“I think we all wish it had gone another way,” said Jim. He sipped his drink and watched Bill as he took his turn assessing the bar. More patrons had come in, the general volume of the place louder than before.

Jim saw Bill smile to himself. “Let’s see what we can do about changing that,” Bill said, before turning back to face Jim. He crossed his arms, resting back in the chair. Bill had filled out since their days at Oxford, but then, so had Jim. Bill still carried himself like a man that was hard to turn away from. Despite spending hours in the Egyptian sun, his shirt seemed to be freshly pressed. “How did you find our rooms?”

It meant did Jim find anything on his rounds. “Well-appointed,” he replied. Plenty of departure options should they be needed and nothing suspicious.

Bill nodded and took a pull of his drink. He toyed with the bottle again with his other hand, tracing his thumb over the Arabic on the label. Bill sighed and put the bottle down again. “Have you ever heard of King Narmer?”

Jim didn’t have to shake his head for Bill to know that he had not.

“He was the king to first unite Upper and Lower Egypt five thousand years ago. Quibell and Green dug up this palette - they used them for grinding make-up - this elaborately carved slab of siltstone. On one side, it shows Narmer in a procession of these conquered towns and there are these two lions with necks like snakes intertwined along with a bull boring through the walls of a citadel.” Jim watched Bill trace the figures on the table with his finger. “The other side shows him wielding a mace over his head and grasping the hair of a kneeling prisoner while standing over the bodies of the dead.”

“A man after you own ideology?” asked Jim. He smirked, knowing it would aggravate Bill to paint it in one dimension.

Bill sighed and poured them both more whisky. “If outright force could establish a civilization that thrived for three thousand years, should it become a tool that we neglect?”

“Is it being neglected? I had not noticed,” said Jim.

Bill waved his hand, “Forgive my artist’s allegory. Drink and tell me how things are at Brixton.”

So they drank and the bar filled and emptied several times over. They had spent many nights like this in the years after Oxford. Jim raised his glass and looked at his drink. No matter how many times he tasted it, it was not vodka. “I never asked, why Asyut? Nasser must still have many English-speaking friends.”

Bill took a moment to look around the bar, but Jim knew that no one had given them as much as a glance since they bought the second bottle of whisky. “This happens to be a man that has his ear on these matters.” Bill took the glass from Jim’s hand and downed the whisky quickly. Jim guessed that meant they were done for the night. “And he owes me a favour.”

“Quite a hefty favour,” said Jim, standing up from the table.

“I did some hefty work here in my day,” Bill replied, standing and tucking the half-full bottle under his arm. “My reputation was not entirely unearned.” They walked out of the bar, Jim still had his feet under him, and Bill said a goodnight to the bartender in Arabic.

The street was dark, illuminated only by the dim light from the bar and the lobby of the hotel. Bill strode ahead and went into the hotel first. Jim took his time walking the short distance. When he got inside, Bill was having a conversation in his butchered, tourist Arabic with the hotel’s night clerk. Not that Jim spoke Arabic, but he knew how it was supposed to sound. He kept waited by the elevator until he heard Bill behind him.

The elevator was old with ornate screens of gold and wood around the metal lattice cage. Jim pressed the button to open the door. He could hear the gears turning. Thankfully this hotel only had two floors. They got on in silence and Bill shut the door behind them and latched it. The elevator began to lurch up to the second floor.

Bill stayed close, but there wasn’t much room for him to move away either. He reached out with his fingers and combed them through Jim’s hair. This was familiar, too. Bill had his hand on Jim’s back when they left the elevator on the second floor.

The hallway was quiet. “Weren’t we in the next room down?” asked Jim as Bill got out the key to the room.

“Ahh, yes,” said Bill. He turned the key in the lock and opened the door. “I switched with Hasani. Didn’t much like the view.” He put the bottle down on the table by the door and kept the lights off. Jim pushed the door shut, making sure it latched. He felt Bill’s fingers again, this time lightly touching his collarbone, just inside his shirt collar.

“Bill.” Jim tried to say it without a question in his voice.

“Jim,” Bill said with finality. Jim was the one who went in for the kiss. They did this less frequently, but Jim still thought of it as habit. Bill’s hand was pressed against his chest as they kissed. Jim’s hands drifted to Bill’s waist and pulled him closer. He heard Bill make an approving noise and their movement towards the bed felt like an inevitability.

Then Jim heard a resounding thud and muffled yelling through the wall from the room next door. It was Hasani’s room. They separated immediately. Bill pressed his ear to the near wall, listening as best he could. Jim grabbed their papers, their money and the gun hidden at the bottom of his bag. He tucked his papers into his right sock and the gun into the back of his trousers. He crossed the room and knelt down to hide Bill’s papers and the money in his socks.

“Two men; they’re looking for us,” Bill whispered as Jim stood up.

“The keys to the jeep are with Hasani,” said Jim. He turned and walked to the window that looked out onto the inner courtyard. There was an awning right below the window. Good on Bill for changing rooms. “Do you think you can wire the car?”

Bill nodded. Jim could tell he was thinking about all of the various thugs that might be on their trail.

Jim opened the window and gestured for Bill to make his exit. “Meet me on the southern road at the edge of the city at dawn. I’m going to draw them away.” As Bill was clambering through the window, they heard the gunshot next door.

“Dawn,” said Bill, before sliding down the awning towards the ground. Jim shut the window behind him, crossed the room and picked up the bottle of whisky from the table. He stood on the far side of the door and waited.

When they kicked the door in, Jim slammed his body against it, pinning the first man. Jim heard him grunt in pain. He quickly pulled the door back open, kicking at the first man’s shins, crumpling him to his knees and then Jim swung the whisky bottle straight into the second man’s face. Jim ignored his scream, shoved past both of them and ran full tilt towards the stairs. He heard a bullet the wall next to him. He ran faster.

Outside in the dark, Jim found a corner across the alley where he could watch the door for the thugs. He tried to slow his breathing. His hand was cut from the glass of the whisky bottle. He tore a strip of fabric from the bottom of his shirt and wrapped it around his palm. It knotted well enough, it should hold. As he watched, only one man emerged from the hotel, the one that Jim had trapped in the door upstairs. He wanted to see where the man would go once he was unable to find Jim.

The thug paced up and down the alley twice, before heading back inside and quickly returning with the second thug, his bleeding face pressed into a hotel towel. They grumbled something in Arabic and headed out into the street. They did not seem particularly persistent for agents, or even floaters. Now that he could look at them in the light, they weren’t even men, just teenagers, young kids barely out of school. Jim followed them, hugging the shadows.

They walked for almost a half hour, winding through back alleys and side streets, leaving the centre of the city behind for the outer slums. At the first house they stopped at, the first kid pounded on the door until a greying man answered. He looked at the injured youth and gestured them into his home. Jim was content to wait without getting close. The two kids emerged some twenty minutes later, the injured one now free of blood and with several bandages on his face.

The next house they went to was a short walk away. There was a single light on inside. Probably someone waiting for them, most likely whoever had sent the thugs after them. Jim waited a few minutes after they had gone inside before approaching the home. He crouched low to the ground, avoiding the dim light from the window as he edged closer. He could hear them arguing, but it was in Arabic. He stood up, leaning against the wall of the house. There wasn’t an angle to look through the window without being seen.

Jim began to move in the other direction, towards a darkened window. He was surprised to find that it lacked any glass. The open window looked into the kitchen and there was a hanging curtain between it and the next room where someone was arguing with the teenagers. Jim put his hands on the window ledge and hoisted himself up. He winced at the pain in his palm as he climbed into the room and quietly lowered himself to the floor.

He crawled his way to the doorway and peered through the curtain. He could see the two kids arguing with someone with his back to Jim. The man was heavyset with greying hair. He carried his weight imperceptibly to the right. The man would walk with a slight limp. The kids were trying to give him a bunch of Egyptian pounds. The notes were in Hasani’s money clip. This couldn’t have all been for just a robbery.

Jim looked around the rest of the room. There was an Egyptian flag hanging on the wall and a framed picture of Nassar. The man began to walk around, his back still facing Jim. He seemed to be ranting, waving his hands and pointing at a frame on a small table. Inside the frame were medals, they looked to Jim like EAF medals. Except the first one, which seemed to be a FOM badge.

The man turned and Jim saw his face: the bartender from the bar. What was a former military hard-line nationalist doing tending bar? Let alone hiring teenagers to do his work for him. His house gave no indication that he had any close connections with the current government, no outward showing of wealth or important friends.

Just a man who hated the English who had a few young cousins who wouldn’t mind killing a few to make some quick money, Jim thought to himself as he eased his way back towards the window. He climbed up and let himself down on the ground outside. He did it quietly, but the house behind him was suddenly silent.

On instinct, he ran.

Jim felt the pain in his left arm before he heard the gunshot. The force of it sent him careening to the right, up against a concrete wall. He pushed off of it and kept running down the alley. Jim wiggled the fingers of his left hand just to make sure that he still could. His upper arm burned in pain. He needed a tourniquet and something to staunch the bleeding, but first he needed a place to hide. He wasn’t going to be another Moorhouse.

There was the sound of yelling from behind him and of gunshots, but Jim couldn’t hear the sound of anything near him being hit. He ducked around a corner, and then another. He kept moving through the maze-like back streets until the sounds behind him had died down. He pilfered some clean laundry and the thin rope that was used to hang it and hunkered down in an empty goat shed to patch to his wound.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, only a graze, no need to have to dig the bullet out on his own. The rope made a decent tourniquet, though it took him a long time to trim down the length of it on a blunt piece of scrap metal. He was able to rip apart a section of a sheet to wind around the wound itself and hopefully keep it from getting infected. He was hours away from a doctor, the best he could hope for was Bill’s remedial first aide. He wore the long robe, but it wouldn’t do much to disguise his face. Dawn was fast approaching and he needed to find his way to the southern end of the city.

It took many wrong turns and some help from the pre-dawn light over the mountains, but Jim was finally able to orient himself and find his way to the south of the city. He had taken off the tourniquet some time ago, but he wouldn’t take off the wrappings to see how the wound was healing. The wind had picked up and there was too much dust in the air. He followed the main road, the one they would have taken with Hasani out of town and towards Asyut - where they would have left him and their Luxor cover stories behind.

The buildings along the road had thinned out considerably and Jim was starting to see a lot more people walking around. He kept his head down and walked briskly, not wanting to draw any attention to himself. For the last few blocks, someone had been following him. They wore a hood so Jim couldn’t see their face, but they weren’t the right height to be the bartender or the kids.

Jim turned a corner calmly and then pressed himself up against the wall and waited for the person to follow him. When they turned the corner, Jim grabbed them and pushed them against the wall, ignoring the pain in his arm. “Bill?”

“All the years we’ve known each other and you act like we’re strangers?” asked Bill, pushing back the hood so Jim could see his face. “What were you able to find out? You look horrible. And you smell like goat.”

“It wasn’t a hostile,” said Jim, letting go of Bill and taking a step back. “Just that bartender. Turns out he’s ex-EAF. Abhors the English. I’m sure he’s the one who shot me. The men at the hotel were just kids.”

“You were shot? Where?” asked Bill.

Jim pulled up his sleeve in reply.

Bill made a face and reached out to touch Jim’s forearm, well below the graze. “I hid the jeep not far from here. I had the time to pick up some necessities as well. I’ll clean you up as best I can and we’ll make Asyut in a couple of hours.” Bill moved so Jim could lean his good side against him. “I’ll even get you a real doctor.”

Jim let himself laugh. “You spoil me.”

 

Bill had found a real doctor, a friend of a friend of an old contact, and after he fixed Jim up with stitches and some penicillin, had let Bill and Jim stay and rest. Jim was not sure how long he slept, but it was beginning to get dark again when he awoke. Bill was just coming in through the door. He must have gone to a dead drop.

Jim pulled himself up to a sitting position. “I don’t like you doing this without anyone else for support.”

Bill sighed. “These drops haven’t been used in years. I don’t even need to meet him tomorrow.” Bill sat next to him. “I just need to check to make sure he got the message.”

“I’ll go with you.”

Bill put a hand on his leg. “You’ll stay here. You went hours without medical treatment. I’d like to make sure you don’t have tetanus.”

“I should have broken their necks when I had the chance,” Jim grumbled to himself.

“That’s the spirit,” said Bill.

They spent one more day in Asyut and by the end of it, Jim was feeling better. He was able to move his arm well enough and without much pain. He made Bill tell him in detail about each of the drops, what he noticed about the area, about the people near it and the routes he took there and back. Bill assured him that nothing suspicious had happened.

Bill had packed Jim a bag, replacing what they’d left behind in Minya. But they weren’t going to travel back together, it was too risky. Jim would book a boat all the way to Alexandria, cross the Mediterranean into Italy and travel over-land back to London. Bill would head East across the Red Sea into Saudi Arabia - avoiding Sinai completely - and go north through Syria and Turkey. Bill’s route would take him longer, but he told Jim that he wanted to visit his old stomping grounds.

“It’ll give me a chance to brush up on my dialects again. And I can nudge Syria in the right direction,” said Bill. He had driven them to the docks to see off Jim.

Jim gave him a sharp look. “Don’t go anywhere near a consulate.”

Bill held up his hands, “I’m keeping my ear to the ground. Nothing more.” They nodded at each other and Jim got out of the jeep and began to walk towards the docks. He’d be riding on a small ship with a few other tourists down the Nile for several days. Maybe he could find time to relax, if he tried.

“Hey!” Bill called after him. Jim turned around. “Don’t leave town until I get there.”

“Okay,” said Jim. “Sure.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to shoemaster for her beta and listening abilities.
> 
> For historical context (learning is fun!):
> 
> Suez Crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
> 
> Moorhouse Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorhouse_Affair
> 
> United Arab Republic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Republic


End file.
